MQ IAT 2008

Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology

30 September 2008

Whit Andrews, Rita E. Knox

Gartner RAS Core Research Note G00161178

The
increased visibility of information access technology in various
aspects of enterprise IT systems has attracted the interest of
megavendors and accelerated the market's consolidation. This Magic
Quadrant will help you find the right vendor for your needs.

What You Need to Know

This document was revised on 1 October 2008. For more information, see the Corrections page on gartner.com.

This Magic Quadrant assesses vendors with
capabilities that go beyond enterprise search to encompass a range of
technologies. Their capabilities include search; federated search,
content classification, categorization and clustering; fact and entity
extraction; taxonomy creation and management; information presentation
(for example, visualization) to support analysis and understanding; and
desktop search to address user-controlled repositories in order to
locate and "invoke" documents, data, e-mail and intelligence.

We consider all enterprise search vendors
to be information access technology vendors. However, those that only
offer search capabilities (frequently called "keyword search") are
neither Visionaries nor candidates for the Leaders quadrant,
although they are part of the market. Finding information, and
acting on it intelligently, demands increasingly sophisticated and
innovative strategies and technologies.

We recommend that large commercial and
government enterprises select at least an information access platform
vendor for the majority of future projects. Platform vendors offer
modular architectures, wide varieties of relevance modeling, multiple
vertical applications and significant customizability. These
enterprises should also typically have a tactical vendor to increase
agility for short-term and quick-start projects. Tactical vendors may
lack architectural sophistication and customizability, but their
products are quicker to deploy and easier to understand. Often,
enterprises obtain search as part of a different product, such as a
portal or enterprise content management (ECM) application. In such
cases, these enterprises may choose to make this embedded search a
target for federation. Large enterprises must also recognize the need
to explore more specialized products for certain important
projects, such as e-discovery, e-commerce search and research science
support.

Figure 1.Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology

Information access technologies access
applications such as document management, Web content management and
relational database management systems to provide users with insight
into their contents. Increasingly, information access technology is
also expected to include results from enterprise applications, such as
customer relationship management (CRM) and legacy systems. In addition,
it increasingly looks outside enterprises as well, to premium sources
of information, Web sites and elements of the social Web. Information
access technology is often acquired as an embedded aspect of other
applications, and OEM arrangements are significant for information
access vendors. Portal, ECM, business application and other vendors
frequently include enterprise search as part of their products.

The first and most mature information
access technology is search engine technology. It has been common since
the mid-1990s, and is typically applied to unstructured data in
document repositories. It includes both enterprise and desktop search.
Increasingly, auto categorization, creative visualization, content
analytics and taxonomy support technologies are being added to this
category.

This Magic Quadrant addresses enterprise
information access vendors. Many of these vendors orient their
technology specifically toward addressing particular business problems,
such as issues of legal discovery and publishing. Many also offer
desktop search applications, and although such personal search
technology is not a primary focus of, or a requirement for, any
of the vendors we have included, its importance is growing.
Information access appliances are increasingly popular as enterprises
like their simplicity. Also, content analytics is emerging as a
category of its own; it is not fully covered here, but is a critical
aspect of our innovation measure. Many vendors that don't offer search
do provide numerous content analytics functions.

Total software revenue in the world's
enterprise search market in 2007 was $860.3 million. We forecast
it to grow to $1.5 billion by 2012, for a compound annual growth rate
of 11.4% (see "Dataquest Insight: Technology and Vendor
Consolidation Will Drive the Enterprise Search Market Through 2012").

The enterprise information access market,
like most technology markets (although not necessarily many of those
that have existed as long), has seen many acquisitions, though
the long-term trend for consolidation is partly offset by the
arrival of new vendors. Most notably, during the past year, Microsoft
acquired Fast Search & Transfer, a Norwegian information access
leader, in a major transaction with far-reaching ramifications. In some
cases, consolidation eliminates software and ultimately forces clients
to shift to new packages; for example, when Autonomy acquired Verity,
it started moving clients to its own software; Fast Search &
Transfer did the same when it bought AltaVista and later Convera's
enterprise business. In other cases, the impact is lesser — Microsoft,
for instance, is maintaining Fast Search & Transfer's software and
has even pledged a commitment to support it on Linux. Most important,
the variety of choices from midsize vendors is shrinking as the
megavendors compete in this market with growing enthusiasm.

Information access technologies find,
collect and condense information or map its native location, so that
users may actively seek it, analyze it effectively and remain informed
about it. Enterprise search, in which users' queries are matched
against an index to return relevant documents and data, is an element
of information access. Information access also includes more
sophisticated capabilities, such as elements of content analytics.

We have included in this Magic Quadrant
only those vendors that incorporate search as the foundational
capability of their information access products. Many include other
capabilities such as auto categorization, taxonomy functions and
clustering, but those that offer only these capabilities, with no
search, were excluded.

We have only included vendors that
actively market their products in two or more of the
following continental markets: Asia, North America, South America,
Europe and Australia. We also required vendors to have grossed
more than $12 million in revenue (for any kind of sale) in
the four quarters ending 31 March 2008. Publicly traded vendors'
filings were considered sufficient evidence of this. Privately held
vendors were asked to provide documentation supporting such figures,
and third-party sources were also consulted.

We also required that vendors actively
market their products in more than two major vertical markets, and in
more than one horizontal application category (such as e-commerce and
customer self-service).

Open-source search engines do exist, but
none is significant enough to threaten the commercial market. Lucene is
the most prominent, but we have excluded it because it is not a
commercial entity and is supported by a non-commercial community.
However, it is growing in influence, as numerous vendors are turning to
it to manage indexing. With rare exceptions, enterprises find it too
taxing, in terms of resources, to develop with. However, the arrival of
Solr, a product founded on Lucene, could change this situation in the
medium term.

In addition, we required that vendors be
able to sell their information access products separately from other
products (such as portals, infrastructure, records management and CRM
offerings). This meant the exclusion of SAP, which stopped selling its
search products separately from its portal products in August 2008,
although the vendor says this will change with the release of a new SAP
Enterprise Search product (initially scheduled for the first half of
2008, but since delayed by a change of strategy).

Many vendors have been removed from the
Magic Quadrant this year because they did not meet one of more of the
inclusion criteria. These criteria are considerably stricter this year,
because enterprises are increasingly looking to a core set of vendors
with substantial financial resources and long-term prospects.
Consequently, the following vendors do not appear this year: Business
Objects (now part of SAP), Consona, Coveo, Dieselpoint, dtSearch,
InQuira, IntelliSearch, Kaidara Software, Mercado, Mondosoft (now owned
by SurfRay), Omniture, PolySpot, Progress Software, Siderean Software,
SLI Systems, Thunderstone, WCC and X1 Technologies. Their exclusion
does not reflect any major change in their suitability for projects —
only alterations to our inclusion criteria.

Fast Search & Transfer is now analyzed under Microsoft, its new owner.

Product/service is largely
determined by a product's versatility in providing connectors for
security models and its ability to connect to repositories effectively.
Additionally, the operating systems supported are a minor component of
this score.

Overall viability of a vendor is
determined by a number of financial indicators, such as cash and cash
equivalents, number of full-time (or equivalent) employees and profits.
We also considered whether a vendor is publicly traded, as this affects
enterprises' perception of its strength.

Sales execution/pricing reflects the licenses sold in the last year, revenue and the appeal of the vendor's pricing models.

Customer experience reflects what
we know of a vendor's performance from our own experience, and
impressions of its position and performance gained through our inquiry
and outreach services.

Operations assesses a vendor's geographical breadth in sales and support.

Market responsivenessand track record and marketing execution are not covered.

Market understanding is a
combination of the vision that a vendor's management has for how
to thrive in the extremely challenging market for information
access technology and of how that vision is manifested in practice.

Marketing strategy assesses how a
vendor actually brings its products to market, including its choice of
vertical and horizontal markets and the logic of its strategic
marketing goal.

Business model assesses a vendor's
product and service delivery models; greater breadth in such models —
particularly those with the greatest potential — confers a better score.

Vertical/industry strategy looks at
a vendor's range of credible offerings for vertical markets, and at how
appropriate those markets are for strategic investment, based on how
fertile they are likely to prove for that vendor. This criterion also
accounts for installations the vendor can cite to demonstrate its
ability to support transformational projects.

Innovation is assessed by looking
at several different factors. These include the vendor's abilities to
address non-textual documents and objects (including audio and video);
federate queries and mix or juxtapose results; perform content
analytics; aid users in disambiguating results through conversational
interfaces; use elements not resident in documents to establish
relevancy (such as citation analysis); and provide enterprise
administrators with clear, meaningful reports on why particular data is
returned as relevant.

Geographic strategy is covered not here but under operations (see the Ability to Execute criteria).

All the Leaders demonstrate significant
architectural flexibility. They also have strong, innovative and broad
means of determining the relevancy of results returned to users, and of
providing developers with the tools and the flexibility to tune
relevancy settings. They have the finances to weather hard times
and sufficient resources to invest in both organic and inorganic
technology and business growth. They also have enough depth and
strength to serve as platform vendors whose software can be used to
solve most information access problems.

Challengers possess sufficient resources
to penetrate the information access technology market effectively.
However, they typically lack the vision to address all information
access opportunities. Information access technology for enterprise use
is not a core source of revenue for Challengers. Any of these vendors
could emerge as Leaders in less than 24 months, if they invest adeptly
in information access technology.

Visionaries demonstrate imaginative and
insightful approaches to the information access technology market, but
currently lack the resources to prove their leadership and guarantee
future strength. They all possess architectural flexibility and
creative means of establishing relevancy. Greater financial resources
and more market traction would improve their position. Visionaries
could become Leaders through stronger market performance. Recommind and
Exalead are the only Visionaries in this year's Magic Quadrant, as
changes to our inclusion criteria eliminated several previous members
of this quadrant.

Niche Players possess the attributes
necessary to fulfill the needs of certain types of information access
project, but they lack the depth and breadth to satisfy a wide variety
of projects. In some cases, they lack the proven financial resources of
Leaders and Challengers. Nor can they demonstrate the depth of vision
that indicates they are leading the market. On the other hand, they are
typically right for a particular set of needs, and they offer
attractive pricing, special capabilities and vertical-market knowledge.

Autonomy's opaque pricing model can irritate prospective customers,
as they cannot predict what price the vendor will offer. Also, they
often find its proposed price the highest of any they receive.

Sales processes are aggressive, sometimes insistent.

Autonomy's ambitions in the field of compliance and litigation
could eclipse its general-purpose information access platform. The
company's recent acquisitions and marketing efforts have centered on
the compliance and litigation sector.

Gartner clients report they find it a challenge to get support and attention for upgrade and improvement sales.

Endeca is increasing its sales and support presence in Europe and Asia by adding support and sales offices.

Endeca's connector family gives it a particularly broad capability
to index from a variety of content sources. These include manufacturing
applications to which few, if any, other vendors connect. Additionally,
Endeca has a unique search federation connector strategy that extends
its reach through enterprises in an innovative fashion.

Endeca records user searches, navigational behavior and the
intersection of the two, providing a unique perspective on users' past
choices and unusually rich user profiles. This information can be
combined with explicit profile data from enterprise-established
permissions and privilege lists.

Endeca has a particular facility with action-oriented content
analytics, such as analysis models covering a broad spectrum of user
behaviors and textual analytics (including concept extraction). Its
recommendation and document summarization engines are especially
effective.

Endeca's significant ambition brings with it a risk of losing
focus. Alone among the major non-infrastructure vendors, Endeca aims to
gain stature as a platform vendor by establishing skills in a very wide
range of vertical and horizontal markets simultaneously. But this
ambition is also a strength, one that could enable Endeca to extend its
success in enterprises through multiple projects.

Challenging market conditions make Endeca a uniquely attractive acquisition target because of its size and position.

Google does not invest significantly in the ability to exploit
users' historical behavior or explicit status in an organization as
means of determining the relevancy of results.

Google lacks deep customization capabilities.

Most of Google's development is targeted toward its "consumer"
business — the advertising-centric core of Google.com and other Web
businesses. However, its enterprise coverage, which also includes
advertising-powered products, is growing.

IBM has multiple information access products, including a free
product developed with Yahoo, a basic enterprise edition, an
edition with significantly advanced capabilities for strategic
deployments in particular vertical sectors, and an offering (IBM
Content Analyzer) intended to fuse search and business intelligence.
Although IBM's ability to address lucrative horizontal sectors such as
e-discovery bodes well for the future, and although its broad range of
offerings caters for deals of different sizes, these factors also
present IBM with a challenge when it comes to rationalizing its branded
products.

For many of its products, IBM does not invest significantly in the
ability to exploit users' historical behavior or explicit status in an
organization as means of determining the relevancy of results.

The Fast Search & Transfer product can establish multiple
profiles for individual users, based on divisions such as time of day
or location ("at home" versus "away"). A Fast client uses such profiles
to provide recommendations and to store analysis of the success of
those recommendations for future reference.

Microsoft's technology has demonstrated the ability to handle
extremely large data sets and heavy traffic, including installations
with "spikes" of over 1,000 queries per second and multi-terabyte
corpora.

Microsoft has a broad sales and support presence in many world regions.

Fast's connector family gives it a particularly broad capability to
index from a variety of content sources. These include records
management applications that relatively few, if any, other vendors
connect with.

Open Text has a significant sales and support presence in many world regions, including Asia and Europe.

A simple pricing model based on concurrent users and modules makes it easy for prospective customers to predict their costs.

Open Text's multimedia strategy for content management — through
its Artesia Digital Media Group and acquisition of eMotion — recognizes
the growing need for information access technology that can analyze
non-textual content.

Open Text is positioning its search technology within its own
product family effectively and investing in its use for Open
Text-resident data and information. However, Open Text does not market
its search technology significantly beyond its core customers,
and its vision is most evident in projects that demand
considerable customization.

Open Text does not invest significantly in the ability to exploit
users' historical behavior or explicit status in an organization as
means of determining the relevancy of results.

The
Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 30 September 2008 by Gartner, Inc. and is
reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical
representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It
depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against
criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not
endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant,
and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors
placed in the “Leaders” quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely
as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action.
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for a particular purpose.